A lot has been going on in the CRISPR world. Here are some key CRISPR updates.

Editas has filed the paperwork on the road to going public as a company. Such an IPO, should it come to fruition, could raise billions of dollars. Will the other CRISPR companies like Caribou and CRISPR Therapeutics follow suit? Simplistically, it seems like the first CRISPR IPO could get the lion’s share of investor money, but then there’s the patent thing hanging over all of this (see below)

Patent dispute rolls on. Jacob Sherkow over at the Stanford Law Blog dug intorecent developments in the CRISPR patent battle. One big thing is the interference proceeding. A patent person I recently communicated with on this topic has some different views than Sherkow on much of this. I’m hoping to blog about that soon.

CRISPR on the news. If you missed it, Jennifer Doudna and I were interviewed by Gwen Ifill on the PBS News Hour last week (see below).

A BBC piece came out that was the subject of quite a bit of discussion on Twitter about whether CRISPR could be used to make a dragon. The item mentioned an article by Hank Greely and Alta Charo on CRISPR Critters (animals made using CRISPR) that had referenced the possibility of making a dragon. I tweeted that that was unlikely but that making a unicorn (adding a horn genetically to horses) was relatively more plausible.

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Here’s a question for the regulatory experts – can any of these CRISPR companies undertake clinical trials before the ownership issue is settled or does ownership only come into play when a product is approved for the market?